Speaker: Let's start off with the easy ones; what is your name and what year were you born?

Mr. O'Brien: Hi! My name is Dan O'Brien and I was born at the tail end of 1949.

Speaker: Perfect and tell us about your career?

Mr. O'Brien: Well, I was an English major in college, Art History minor so, I wanted to follow sort of a humanities path. I worked as a newspaper reporter for a couple of years and then ended up in book publishing for 5 years. I went to business school up in Boston and when I got out of business school the tech boom was happening in the mid '80s. I jumped on that train and worked as a product manager, documentation editor and so forth and finally ended up as a freelancer on my own. For a few years, I worked at a research house named Forester Research and wrote a lot of reports about trends that were happening in the industry. For the past few years, I have been a freelance business writer and I cover all kinds of subjects. Right now, the mobility seems to be the biggest topic that I'm asked to write about so, I'm sort of an expert on mobile technology e-Wallets and so forth.

Speaker: When you were coming out of business school and the tech boom in the '80s was going on, what was the investing landscape like at that time?

Mr. O'Brien: In the early '80s was before the whole democratization, if you will, of investor trading and it still cost a lot to make a trade. Most people own mutual funds. Individuals didn't own individual stocks as much and so, as I invented my 401(k) and my personal portfolio I was pretty much in mutual funds so, index funds and so forth. It wasn't until later in the '80s when all of a sudden they brokerage houses started competing with each other to lower the price. It went from $30 to $40 a trade down to $8 to $10 a trade and it began to draw a lot of investors like me into the market.

Speaker: In that time when you were investing in your 401(k) and I believe you said IRA and things like that, what were your overall returns at that time?

Mr. O'Brien: My overall returns in the 401(k) and the IRA were not great. Of course, they take fees away to manage one's account so, I think I was happy if the returns were in the 2% or 3% per year range.

Speaker: What was the overall market doing at that time?

Mr. O'Brien: The market didn't really take off like a rocket until the '90s so, during the '80s it was fairly flat. The '70s had been terrible for investors and people had lost money or made nothing over 10 years. The '80s started to pick up some steam and companies like Microsoft and so forth were starting to grow and getting out of the doldrums of the '70s, but it didn't really take off until later, later in the '80s.

Speaker: Were you investing in those tech stocks back then?

Mr. O'Brien: Well, I didn't have a lot of control over my personal choices because it was through 401(k)s and IRAs and I couldn't pick this stock or this mutual fund, I had a limited menu of choices and I really enjoyed later having the opportunity to pick and chose which stock to buy.

Speaker: You were, obviously, invested in the '80s and putting money into 401(k)s and IRAs and things like that. Tell me what it felt like when the market collapsed of 2000 and you saw, presumable you saw your money just disappear. What was that like and kind of what emotion did that bring out in you?

Mr. O'Brien: Well, when the market crashed it burst my bubble in more ways than one. I have the advantage of the disadvantage of starting to invest at the ground floor of the .com boom in the early '90s and the '90s was a roller coaster of a ride and I confused that general success with my investing smarts and I could invest in this and it went up and I would invest in that and it went up so, I was on all of these hot .com companies that most of which are not even with us anymore and I seemed to be making a lot of money. One day I recall my portfolio went up by $88,000 in one day so, I thought man I'm set for life. When the crash happened I couldn't believe that I had been so wrong and so as these stocks went down I bought more of them. I said if it was a great stock yesterday, it is an even better buy today, but it would drop again by half and I ended up taking a significant seven figure portfolio and seeing it shrink down about 80% and left me sort of in a rubble as an investor. I didn't know what to believe. I realized that I didn't know enough to do it on my own and that's when I started exploring newsletters to see if I could get some better advice and guidance on what to do.

Speaker: When you saw a seven figure nest egg slashed by 80% did you have a hard time sleeping at night, kind of take me through that time period where you literally just saw 80% of your money gone?

Mr. O'Brien: Well, when I saw my money vanish it was almost a feeling of disbelief. You get so wrapped up in this bubble mentality that you don't really face the reality. You think that it is just a correction, it’s a big correction, but I'm going to come back. I'm going to be made whole again. I'm going to be bigger and better than ever in a few months, next year, the year after, its just the matter of being patient, staying in the market, not bailing out, but it was the wrong thing to do and I didn't know which stocks had real value and which stocks were temporary phenomenon and, unfortunately, I just kept buying it and buying it and there's something in the human mind that tries to make the best of a bad situation so, I don't think it hurt my sleep I just figured it was a matter of time until my bubble mentality came back. I didn't call it that, but I thought that if I stuck with these stocks long enough then in a couple of years I would be better off than ever.

Speaker: Do you attribute some of that no big deal to the financial media at the time kind of just saying, you know, every .com you got to own it, you got to buy it, these things are great, do you kind of say, you know, not that they were (inaudible) it, but that they were kind of keeping the illusion going that all of these .com stocks were, you know, the future of investing?

Mr. O'Brien: Well, the media tends to, you know, if it bleeds it bleeds and they would focus on this crash and they actually didn't say that everything was going to be okay. They said that the fees were too high, this is a fantasy, the dance was over and these stocks were dead, but I wouldn't believe that. I was working in the tech industry myself and I felt that I had more than average knowledge of these trends and what was happening with online search and ecommerce and so forth, I figured I know better than they do and, again, it is a form a denial I guess, but I should have listened to, but I didn't know who to listen to and I figured man technology is going to be the defining trend of the next 10, 15, 20 years and I want to be on that train rather than buy orphans and widow stocks, which seemed to be the alternative; either the hot stocks on one side or the boring stocks over here and I wanted to stay with the hot stocks, the growth stocks and that was, in retrospect, a big mistake.

Speaker: So you, you know, the tech bubble happens and your portfolio is down 80%, you know, you finally get to the point where the bleeding stops and things kind of stabilize, did you start investing again and slowly rebuild your nest egg over the next 5 to 6 years or kind of, between that drop off and kind of building up to the next financial crisis in 2008 what were you doing with your investments kind of through that time period?

Mr. O'Brien: Well, after everything dropped there were a lot of bargains to be had and I figured that from my understanding of the market you don't sell at the top, or you do try to sell at the top, you don't sell at the bottom so, I took what was left and I tried to invest more conservatively. I started subscribing to multiple newsletters that seemed to have a good track record and I started rebuilding the portfolio and until the crisis of 2008 arrived, I was doing pretty well. I had gotten back to where I was in 2000. The NASDAQ had gone from 5,000 to 1,500 I think and it crept its way back up, but nothing close to those highs so, I had a mix of tech stocks and more traditional conservative stocks and I was doing, I thought I was doing pretty well. I built it up and maybe gotten back 1/3 of what I had lost, but the trend was positive and I'm an optimist by nature so, I thought I was on the right track; it's going to be okay.

Speaker: Then take me through the 2008 financial collapse, was it déjà vu all over again, kind of walk me through those, you know, 12 to 18 months.

Mr. O'Brien: Well, to some extent it was déjà vu.

Speaker: Please pause, if you can phrase it by saying "you know, the 2008 collapse" and just kind of give a time reference.

Mr. O'Brien: The 2008 collapse did create a sense of déjà vu all over again. I had a different mix of stocks, a different mix of holdings, but what surprised me and, again, proved that I didn't really know what I was doing in the market was that even these solid conservative stocks that had been paying dividends for many, many years that were sort of iconic American stocks they declined by 40% so, I didn't have the protection I thought I had by mixing my portfolio between the growth stocks and the more conservative stocks; everything seemed to go down that I was holding anyway and so I lost 40% in 2008/2009 and so, it left me really scratching my head as to how to defend myself as I got older and how to have a consistent income stream that I couldn't outlive. It really became, as I got into my 50s it became a priority to come up with a better strategy that would be sustainable.

Speaker: So, going through an 80% collapse in the .com, kind of getting 30% of that back, feeling like you kind of stabilized and now you just lost another 40%, did you ever doubt like will I ever be able to retire? Will I ever have enough money to eventually walk away and spend time or was there a fear in your mind like, you know, if this happens again I may be working until the day I drop?

Mr. O'Brien: Yeah, I mean the second drop in 2008 not only got my attention, but it really started me worrying in a more emotional way. I think I lost more sleep then than during 2000 because I was older and because I was worried about my long term financial security. I had contributed the maximum to my IRA every year, I converted a traditional IRA into a Roth IRA so I could invest in different things and avoid taxes so, I was making (I thought) sensible moves, but I didn't feel that I had unlocked the key to sustainable income growth over time by sticking to a discipline. I would get a new newsletter and it would have a different approach, you know, it would have a portfolio and every month 2 new stocks were added to that and I would go in that direction until those stocks dropped and then I would subscribe somewhere else so, I felt that I was zigzagging around and not making the money and I didn't think that any strategy would take me over the long term.

Speaker: Okay. Have you ever used a money manager or a broker to handle your investments or has it all kind of been under your direction?

Mr. O'Brien: From the start I managed my own money with the exception of mutual funds that were done through the company - 401(k). I used to tell people that I treated my stocks as if they were my sports teams and I'm not a big organized sports fan, but I used to read the Wall Street Journal every day and look for mentions of my companies and see how they were doing and who they were merging with, who they were acquiring, what new product announcements they had and so those were my guys and I would cheer them on and perhaps that's not a good way to approach stocks either, but it was a hobby; investing was a hobby, but as I got older it became more and more serious hobby and I really told myself that I had to find a way to have a long term strategy that I didn't keep changing every 18 months because if you have to change a strategy every 18 months you are going to lose money. You are going to take loses, you are going to pay taxes and what I wanted was something that I could depend from a source that really worked well. I never worked with financial advisors and perhaps I should have. I never took any broker's advice. I got lots of e-mails from Fidelity to have a free consultation to do my retirement planning, but I never took advantage of that. I didn't want anybody telling me what to do and when I looked at the results of these …

Speaker: We just lost the light.

Speaker: Okay, got it.

Speaker: Man, we were on a roll too.

Mr. O'Brien: Hold that thought (laughing).

Speaker: He's not grilling you too hard is he?

Mr. O'Brien: No, I can take it.

Speaker: So, if you can, just recap a little bit, you know Fidelity emailed you, you kind of ignored that and said, because where I think you were going and what I would like to capture is, you know, I didn't want someone else telling me what to do with my money so, just kind of take us through that again.

Mr. O'Brien: Yeah. When I shifted my portfolio to Fidelity I got numerous emails offering their services, free consultations on portfolio management, introduction to their different index stocks and retirement planning advisors and I resisted that and I still do resist that. I don't think anybody knows more about what I want and my needs and my history than I do and I wanted control over my stocks. I didn't want somebody taking 1% or 2% of my portfolio every year to give me advice and when I did some research into how well these managed portfolios did most of the time they lost to the indexes so, you had a lot of smart people supposedly moving money here from here, selling this and buying that, but over the long term they didn't do any better than the passively managed indexed funds so, that told me that no one should be responsible but myself, but I wanted to be in that top 20%, if you will, that outperformed the market and I tried many ways during the '80s and '90s to get there and haven't found it.

Speaker: So when you were, as you mentioned earlier, for years and I'm not sure how long it was 5, 10, 15 years, you were just zigzagging back and forth, you know, the next hot way to invest you were jumping around. If you can, take us through that period of all of that and kind of tell what you're investing results and how things were from that strategy?

Mr. O'Brien: Over that really 20 years of acting investing I'd done I found myself zigzagging from one strategy to another. I would subscribe to a newsletter that had a particular philosophy and a particular portfolio and I would buy those stocks based on the track record, but then it seemed like the day after I bought something it would drop by 10% and adding two new stocks to each month to my portfolio meant that I had to sell other things so, I found myself very frustrated and I would give a newsletter a year or two and stick with that and find that I was at break even for that two year period and I shouldn't have been. I tried a new newsletter that had, it took a growth philosophy or they specialized in industries like real estate or in commodities or precious metals and no matter what I tried it seemed I didn't get the results that their track records suggested that I should get so, it became this frustration and sometimes I would read an article that said, you know, the individual cannot be the market basically. You should just face the facts and invest in index funds, go up and down with the S&P 500 and be satisfied with that. The stock market over time and historically does 8% or 10% a year if you average out all of the ups and downs and that’s the most you can hope for. I still don't believe that and with the Dividend Machine I think I'm proving that position to be incorrect.

Speaker: Great. So, how did you first hear about Bill Spetrino and the Dividend Machine?

Mr. O'Brien: I think I first heard about Bill Spetrino and the Dividend Machine though an email promotion because I was using so many other newsletter those newsletters would sale my contact information to other publishers and so I got a pitch and being in the frame of mind that I was still looking for a long term advisory from somebody I could really trust I tried the trial subscription with the Dividend Machine.

Speaker: What was it like when you discovered Bill Spetrino's Dividend Machine? It seems like you were, were you still kind of zigzagging back and forth between different investment philosophies and you just kind of read it to read it or were you investing right away or what was it like when you first discovered Bill and the Dividend Machine?

Mr. O'Brien: When I first discovered Bill and the Dividend Machine I was still zigzagging around and had developed quite a bit of skepticism about any newsletter. I talked myself into subscribing to somebody's philosophy and then found that it didn't really pan out or I would subscribe to something and the editor would disappear and go to work for a competitor so, I don't think I spent a lot of money because this was super expensive, a $5,000 a year newsletter; they were less expensive than that, but I felt that I hadn't found something really substantive, as I said, for a long term approach and when I first started reading Bill's materials he knew where I was coming from. He talked about people loosing much of their net worth very quickly and the mistake they made and his approach was very educational. He was saying this is the way the world works, this is the way the stock market works, and the whole exposure to the dividend reinvesting philosophy was new to me. In my mind, dividend stocks were for other people. They were for those who didn't think their companies had a chance of growing quickly anymore, they were boring, they paid out a dividend because the companies had nothing better to do with their money than pay a dividend out rather than reinvesting in their growth so, I thought that's not for me, but Bill opened my eyes to that and his track record is excellent. I tried pretty soon after the newsletter started publishing so, there wasn't a long track record of the newsletter's choices, but his personal background and the stocks, if you track them back over time, had done very well and when you start to analyze the math of compounding the reinvestments its remarkable. You can start with a fairly small stake in a company and, over time, your effective yield is in the double digits and I didn't realize that so, I sat down and calculated on spreadsheets on my own and found that it was, in fact, the case; that this might be the holy grail for me, the approach that would really work regardless of the economy, would work over the next 2 or 3 or 4 decades and it was great.

Speaker: And since you have had, and if you can, kind of start by saying you know, whatever your returns have been since that time, you know, with Bill I've gotten this much and if you have, and I think I know the answer and that's why I'm trying to lead this way, and if you just kind of scrapped everything and just focus on, you know I don't subscribe to the $1,000 newsletter any more. I got these returns and with Bill it only costs me $100 a year and kind of that whole approach.

Mr. O'Brien: Once I got comfortable with Bill's investing strategy and his picks, I tiptoed into the dividend world and committed myself to stick with this for the next year or two hoping not to be disappointed again, but his returns were so much better than I was getting anywhere else that I started cancelling my other subscriptions. His portfolio is not just a list of stocks, but it gives waiting and where to spend, where to invest more heavily on stocks as opposed to under waiting other stocks. I found that incredibly helpful for me. I was investing the same amount in every stock pick and because I had owned so many stocks from all of these newsletters I must have had 120 different positions at one point. No individual position could ever gain that much, even if it would double it wouldn't affect my portfolio's results. Working with Bill's limited list and waitings I was starting to develop larger and larger positions in a smaller and smaller number of stocks and I would have been uncomfortable with that before Bill, but the kinds of stocks that he was choosing were robust, if the market would drop they would drop some but not as much as the whole market and reinvesting the dividends brought me more shares every quarter because of the lower price so, that juiced my returns again. Right now, I don't subscribe to any other newsletters and I don't read Fortune or Forbes or the Motley Fool or Yahoo Finance. I found that too much information in a sense can be a bad thing. It can lead you down to buying this and that (the latest hot trend) and that was my own doing in the past and now I look to Bill to keep me up to date on the stocks to buy and his very tight discipline of buy under prices. Before, I would have said if it is a good stock over the long term it doesn't matter what price you buy it at; it will pay for itself over time. Bill's philosophy is (inaudible), you need the right stock, but you also need to buy it at the right price.

Speaker: And how has …

Speaker: Look right here and I'll tell you when … go ahead.

Mr. O'Brien: My name is Dan O'Brien and I'm a Dividend Machine subscriber.

Speaker: All right. Let me look through this real quick to see if there is anything that I want to touch on. If you can just kind of capsulate, you know there is no reason to pay thousands of dollars a year to receive bad advice when you get, you know Bill's advice for whatever it turns out to be.

Mr. O'Brien: You know, I don't think there is any reason to subscribe to really expensive newsletters to get financial advice. Personally, I've subscribed to newsletters that cost $2,000 or $3,000 a year in the hope that this would be an exclusive audience, I would get tipped off on stocks that the general public didn't get to dive on, but my results were dismal. I lost money. I think I lost money on the high priced newsletters more than the low priced newsletters. There's no reason for anybody to spend that kind of money for solid financial advice when you can get the Dividend Machine for under $100 a year.

Speaker: Perfect and if there is one thing you would want to tell Bill Spetrino what would it be?

Mr. O'Brien: Um, if there is one thing I would like to tell Bill Spetrino it would don't ever stop editing the Dividend Machine.

Speaker: I'm happy.

Speaker: Good.